Council of Elders 10N - Is this a good thing?

Hey everyone, sorry in advance if i'm posting it in the wrong section.
I'm in a casual guild and we are on Council NM 10m. We do not have dps/healing issues i think (same group that killed horridon), we are just following a strategy that i think it is wrong at all.
We tank Sul, Mar'li and Malakk together for cleave targetting the empowered one, tanks swap Malakk at 8-9-10 stacks. I'm a tank and i find stacks management more difficult than having bosses spread in the room. More issues come when Sul becomes empowered: we have adds, 3 bosses and Kazrajin spinning like a hell. All viable at this point. But here comes the real issue: is a good thing to not take care of Blessing Loa Spirits and keep all three bosses together? I think they heal a lot and keeping them alive isn't worth at all for higher dps. It seems that in my group i am the only one who thinks that this strategy is a mess. Am i wrong?
Sorry for bad english, i'm italian and thanks in advance! Ask for further informations if you need.

tl;dr
Is a good thing to keep Blessed Loa Spirits alive and cleave all three elders together?

You need pretty high dps to keep them together and cleave them down while ignoring loa spirits. Without logs to look at all I can go by is that your raid has only killed 2 bosses in about 10 weeks of ToT being out, which leads me to assume the dps group is probably not capable of the cleave strat (No disrespect meant here, just all I have to go by.) If you separate them and have range kill the Loa spirit Sul will not be healing and your group might be able to burn him before an empowerment, which makes this fight extremely trivial.

What we did on progression was tank the priest away from Sul and Frost King. We lusted at the start and did a burn on Sul during lust while making sure to knock frost king out of empowerment as close to 100 energy as possible. From there we left our melee on Sul with the tank and burned him down before his empowerment. After this it's just a matter of killing the rest of the bosses and letting no empowers go off. We found this strat took less DPS and healing to pull off and the fight was very easy (before their HP nerd the first week too). I'd say try that strat out, and if your dps isn't high enough for that just keep them apart like I said and kill them in the order they empower with any extra dmg on Sul so he doesn't empower twice.

I think the strategy of seperating Marli from the others is better for a first kill. Of course, we dont care that much anymore, but with a kill each week since the boss came out we really outgear the fight. However you dont, and seperating Marli from the others is for you most likely more beneficial, since you probably lack the gear(and therefore dps) to just cleave them down.

My guild attempted the "Group up" strat but it proves too chaotic once Sul summons adds.
What worked for us was just as the others suggested. Pre Pot, blow Hero/Bloodlust and burn Sul from the start. When the King reaches 40 % energy, everyone switch to the Empowered adds, with the exception of maybe 1 or 2 (we left rogue on him for interrupts). He will usually die before he becomes empowered, thus no sandstorm, thus no adds . Sul out of the way makes this fight much easier. Good luck.

We've been tanking all three of them on one spot and just taunt-swap the Frost Lord somewhere between 10 and 15 stacks.

Regarding the Frost Lord:
I don't get what you mean by "Stack management more difficult than having bosses spread", firstly: BigWigs / DBM tell you when stacks start / how high they are and secondly: You'd still have to swap even if you tank them apart, or are you just letting your tank get frozen?

Regarding Sul / Sand Adds:
The whole point of stacking / cleaving them is to kill Sul before he gets empowered. You start the fight with pre-pot, heroism / bloodlust and dps cooldowns and burn down Sul for atleast 40 seconds while cleaving the others. Then you switch to the empowered Troll just to reset the dark energy and continue to finish off Sul.

Once you've got enough gear you can start solo-tanking / healing it and just decimate it.
This is our last log: Link
Basically everyone was just doing dps (disc priest just healed through attonement and the occasional penance when the tank is frozen, monk healed through eminence while cleaving).

Granted, you need some gear to support that - but it shows that you gain more than enough damage from stacking and cleaving them than you'd lose for splitting them and wasting dps on the Blessed Spirits.

Edit: Most importantly:
The Blessed Loa Spirit only heals for 3.7M while having 1.4M hp itself. So you only save yourself 2.3M dmg for having to organize stuns / target switches... not worth the trouble.

it is entirely possible to solo tank this encounter as all tanking classes, this means ignoring all but the empowered loa spirits spawned by marli. this also means you will eat the stun from malak (helps if you have a priest to grip the tank away from a sand trap thing on the ground, should he be stunned in one). We had 1 melee dps on Sul the entire time, interupting on every cd and gradually bringing him down, while the remaining 4 dps kept on changing the single nuke target whenever the empowerment changed.

When you tank all 3 and occasionally Khazra'jin as well in one tight bunch, the cleave your tank and the dps can do will most likely double your raid dps, and as such make the fight a lot easier.

this is the WoL parse from one of our kills, note how the one tank we had was able to pull off rank#1 parse on that encounter on 10m normal in the world. if you have the ability to pull it off, single tanking and ignoring some mechanics in the fight will make it alot shorter and easier.

Tanking all of them together is pretty much the best tactik on 10 man normal. The amount of dps lost by switching targets and NOT being able to cleave from the Loa to sul or the posessed one, is just far too much. Adds have what... 4% of one boss' hp. They heal for 5. If anyone has the exact numbers for add healing done, I would be very happy to hear those. Everybody just needs to make sure they are prioritising Sul (even tanks and healers who do some damage) and not cheesing recount. Keep one to two melee dps on Sul all the time. The way we found it to work was: Everybody on Sul when Malakk is empowered. A few dot's and a lot of cleave will push malak. One melee dps on Sul all of the time during kazrajin's empowerment; a second one is on him for about half the phase. In the last "phase" all melee dps are on him.

Granted, you need some gear to support that - but it shows that you gain more than enough damage from stacking and cleaving them than you'd lose for splitting them and wasting dps on the Blessed Spirits.

Edit: Most importantly:
The Blessed Loa Spirit only heals for 3.7M while having 1.4M hp itself. So you only save yourself 2.3M dmg for having to organize stuns / target switches... not worth the trouble.

I think this is objectively wrong. At high DPS you can clump them no problem. At low DPS/gear spotting Sul 25% extra HP is foolish. The main DPS check is killing Sul before his Empower doing extra cleave damage to other un-Empowerred Council members doesn't have much effect on whether you can kill the fight comfortably. There's no way you gain 2.3 million DPS on Sul by having 2-3 DPS turn and fire a few nukes at the Blessed Loa.

If Sul is getting Empowered you shouldn't be clumping them up for cleave and you should be killing Blessed Loas. Your primary goal should be to kill Sul before his Empowerment (which will be last as long as he's the lowest HP) while making sure none of the Council members are at 100 energy for more than a few seconds.

I think this is objectively wrong. At high DPS you can clump them no problem. At low DPS/gear spotting Sul 25% extra HP is foolish. The main DPS check is killing Sul before his Empower doing extra cleave damage to other un-Empowerred Council members doesn't have much effect on whether you can kill the fight comfortably. There's no way you gain 2.3 million DPS on Sul by having 2-3 DPS turn and fire a few nukes at the Blessed Loa.

That's what? 75k hps Sul gets from add getting to him? So you need 75k dps more on Sul to outweigh that? Your tank that is supposed to be on the priestess far away should already overcome that.

Also suggest 2-healing this strongly OP. Short pain, 3 minutes and fight is over anyway once Sul is dead before his empower. 3 dps on Sul fulltime with both tanks as well, 3 dps swap to empowered (perhaps a 4th on charger since he gets least cleaves).

We tried having them split up and wiped for like an hour, next week we went in and 2 shot it with them all stacked up. It's a lot easier that way since you can just ignore the healing adds, but Sul should never be Empowered. From what I've seen Sul always empowers last (not sure if that's legit, but I've never seen him empower 2nd or 3rd), so he's pretty easy to kill before he Empowers, even without amazing DPS. My groups DPS is kind of mediocre I'd say, and we don't have any issues. Just focus Sul until the Empowered target is at 40-50 energy, then swap to the Empowered add.

As for swapping for the ice thing, we don't bother, it's easy enough to just heal through every time. We have our lesser geared tank take the Priest add and stack her on Sul and the Frost guy, then he just tanks the Priest all fight and interrupts. Then we have our more geared DK tank take both Sul and the Frost guy, and he tanks them both all fight, even through the stuns. Yes the stun is a long time (15 seconds I think?) but it's really not very hard to heal through at all, and having the tanks swap just adds another mechanic that can be easily avoided, so there's little point in doing that in normal.

I think this is objectively wrong. At high DPS you can clump them no problem. At low DPS/gear spotting Sul 25% extra HP is foolish. The main DPS check is killing Sul before his Empower doing extra cleave damage to other un-Empowerred Council members doesn't have much effect on whether you can kill the fight comfortably. There's no way you gain 2.3 million DPS on Sul by having 2-3 DPS turn and fire a few nukes at the Blessed Loa.

What...? Who said 2.3M dps? I said you save yourself from having to do 2.3M extra damage per Blessed Loa Spirit, which spawns every 35secs (equaling 66k dps).

So, if your raid gains more than 66k dps by clumping them up it's a net gain, simple as that.

So, using your numbers, you'd have to take more than 5 Spirits (25%) to kill Sul, meaning 3m 30s or above. (This is all under your assumption of +25% on his hp being crucial)

It's plain foolish to kill the Blessed Loa Spirit in 10N, it has 1.4M hp and only heals for 3.7M... think of it like this:
- it's basically just a 2.3M heal, meaning just 3% of their max hp every 35 seconds...
- the time it takes you to kill the add that restores 5% of Suls hp you could actually just continue to nuke Sul and remove 7-8% of his hp, leaving you with 2-3% gain... your dps on the boss will always be higher than on the add (due to switching target and canceling casts, using GCDs for stuns / slows, let alone the missing debuffs)

As for swapping for the ice thing, we don't bother, it's easy enough to just heal through every time. We have our lesser geared tank take the Priest add and stack her on Sul and the Frost guy, then he just tanks the Priest all fight and interrupts. Then we have our more geared DK tank take both Sul and the Frost guy, and he tanks them both all fight, even through the stuns. Yes the stun is a long time (15 seconds I think?) but it's really not very hard to heal through at all, and having the tanks swap just adds another mechanic that can be easily avoided, so there's little point in doing that in normal.

It's not about the damage being unhealable, more so about losing valuable dps. 15 seconds stun on a tank that was tanking 2 mobs and got some extra vengeance from frigid assault is easily 2-3M damage if you clump em up. You're basically advising 1 person in your entire raid not pressing 1 button (which can easily be communicated and dbm shows it as well) at the cost of couple million damage done loss and more damage intake. I don't see why you would ever not do that. Is it needed (for you)? Probably not, as you said so yourself. For anyone struggling with this encounter there is literally no reason to eat the stun though if you ask me. It's not like tanks got any mechanics to watch otherwise anyway, no movement needed apart from initial positioning, so just normal rotation with the occassional interrupt thrown in.

More issues come when Sul becomes empowered: we have adds, 3 bosses and Kazrajin spinning like a hell. All viable at this point. But here comes the real issue:

The real issue is Sul not dieing before he empowers. Thats the whole point of stacking them and cleaving them.

Just ignore the adds, theres no doubt about it - the damage you gain from stacking and ignoring the adds far outweighs any heals. Anyone that tells you otherwise is wrong. Any tanks dps will double going from dpsing one boss to 3, damage dealers will also benefit.

The real issue is Sul not dieing before he empowers. Thats the whole point of stacking them and cleaving them.

Just ignore the adds, theres no doubt about it - the damage you gain from stacking and ignoring the adds far outweighs any heals. Anyone that tells you otherwise is wrong. Any tanks dps will double going from dpsing one boss to 3, damage dealers will also benefit.

to add on to this, what is your strat op?
on the pull, bloodlust and dps sul and cleave everything else. switch to Mal if here's about to empower. (might want 1 dps to focus him)
after that it should go to marli, focus back on sul and dps him. repeat above (focus dps sul).
after that it should go on Kaz, focus on sul and dps him (he should die here if he hasn't yet).

We've been tanking all three of them on one spot and just taunt-swap the Frost Lord somewhere between 10 and 15 stacks.

Regarding the Frost Lord:
I don't get what you mean by "Stack management more difficult than having bosses spread", firstly: BigWigs / DBM tell you when stacks start / how high they are and secondly: You'd still have to swap even if you tank them apart, or are you just letting your tank get frozen?

I don't know, maybe i am wrong but i noticed that he starts earlier to put stacks on the tank that takes him. But it seems that it is not a problem considering that some people let the tank freeze.

Originally Posted by Deja Thoris

The real issue is Sul not dieing before he empowers. Thats the whole point of stacking them and cleaving them.

Just ignore the adds, theres no doubt about it - the damage you gain from stacking and ignoring the adds far outweighs any heals. Anyone that tells you otherwise is wrong. Any tanks dps will double going from dpsing one boss to 3, damage dealers will also benefit.

Yeah the issue is this, at all. We don't kill Sul before he empowers.

Originally Posted by bals

to add on to this, what is your strat op?
on the pull, bloodlust and dps sul and cleave everything else. switch to Mal if here's about to empower. (might want 1 dps to focus him)
after that it should go to marli, focus back on sul and dps him. repeat above (focus dps sul).
after that it should go on Kaz, focus on sul and dps him (he should die here if he hasn't yet).

I can't tell you the op sequence because we are trying several ones. I think that now it will be prepot-hero-nuke sul and cleave the first empowered (i.e. Malakk until now in each try).

As others have said, the key to this fight is Sul. He empowers and the fight is at least twice as hard as it needs to be.

I advise you to put the melee on him, and have others help out as well. You can clump up the frost guy with him to get cleaves going on both of them. We still keep the healer out of the group and have one or two DPS switch to the add when it spwns, but there's no good reason for that other than habit and somehow feeling that it's part of the mechanics. Spinny guy goes wherever he feels like anyway.

You should be able to get Sul down before he gets his first sand summon off, and even (when you get better) before he empowers at all.

We ignore the blessed spirits and it works just fine for our raid group and composition. The key question is how much you're focusing Sul. If you're getting to a sandstorm phase, you're not doing enough dps for the clump up strategy to work correctly. When do you bloodlust? Do you focus everything on Sul when the empowered boss is at low energy? At what energy do you swap?

Ideally with the burn Sul strategy you're switching late enough to kill the empowered guy just as the first tick of dark power goes off.